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Ghosts were important to Robertson Davies. For the 18 years he was Master at Massey College, he came up with a yearly story to regale the guests at his annual Gaudy Night party.

It’s a trait John Fraser, the current Master, riffs on.

“He’s pretty present around here — I think of his Jungian ghost being around here all the time,” Fraser laughs. “There’s the statue of him, the library. There are still people here who worked for him. He was — and still is in some ways — a very alive presence here.”

On Tuesday, Massey College, as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, will pay tribute to the man who founded the college and then presided over it for nearly two decades. The ceremony will feature the official unveiling of a Canada Post stamp honouring Davies, who would have been 100 this year.

The Canadian writer died in 1995, leaving behind a legacy of three trilogies, including the Deptford Trilogy — still required reading in classrooms across the country. (Even buzzfeed.com says you need to read it in your twenties) — as well as other novels, essays and stage plays.

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Davies was known to be deeply into Jungian psychoanalysis — exploring the meaning and importance of universal archetypes informed his work. Being thought of as the archetypal ghost would, perhaps, amuse him. Being honoured by Massey College and his country would, perhaps, have surprised him.

“I think he would have been incredibly pleased and honoured that his country was observing his centenary in this way,” says Jennifer Surridge, Davies’ daughter, who was involved in putting the stamp together and choosing the images and will be at the unveiling ceremony. “He was very doubtful about his writing,” she says, “about its worth.”

There is an iconic image of Robertson Davies that stretches back decades: that of the larger-than-life man of letters sweeping through Massey College with his black cape and long white beard flowing about him.

“That was a bit exaggerated,” laughs Ramsay Derry, a former editor of Davies and a longtime friend. Davies was dramatic, certainly, and felt that he had a role to play in Canadian letters.

“He had an immense range,” Derry says. Not only did he write “at a steady pace,” he created the vision of Massey College as an intellectual community and broad-ranging think-tank.

By the time he became Master in 1961, Derry says, Davies already had a successful career, including being the “most-performed Canadian playwright” in Canada at the time, as well as being well-known as an author, essayist and critic. He had also been the literary editor at Saturday Night magazine and had run the highly regarded Peterborough Examiner newspaper, an established voice in the Canadian canon.

“From about 1945 onwards he was writing Canadian plays, Canadian novels. They were taking place in Canada. They were about Canadians.”

While, as Derry points out, he “assumed quite a lot of the British tradition in Canada,” the characters and settings were in Canada.

Davies wrote in the generation just before Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, the writers who, in the 1960s and 1970s, came to embrace Canadian nationalism and define how we view ourselves through our literature.

But Davies’ writing took a turn in the early 1970s when the Deptford Trilogy came out. It was “more substantial . . . than much of his earlier work,” Derry says.

In a 2005 introduction to a reissued Fifth Business, for example, the writer M.G. Vassanji refers to the relevance of Davies’ observations of small-town life, Victorian mores, British influence.

“In his imaginative exploring of where he came from, he becomes remarkably contemporary, joining the company of many a writer who arrives at new shores . . . to dissect the life and place he or she has left behind,” Vassanji wrote.

The idea of Davies being seen as a writer who helped usher in a new take on the nation is quite different from the man who some critics perceived as old-fashioned and whose writing has been likened to Dickens — a moral flair from a strongly moral man.

But he’s still read around the world. Davies’ works have been translated into at least 17 languages. Last year, says Surridge, a translation of Fifth Business won an award in Spain.

The canon will continue to grow with the upcoming publication of his diaries. Surridge and Derry are working on them together, with the first to be released in 2015, 20 years after his death.

“In some of his writing he was quite harsh,” Surridge says. The delay was necessary because “he didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

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